When looking at disparities between different race/ethnicity groups, we need to keep in mind that some states and counties have severe data completeness issues, as discussed in the data completeness analysis.
In the charts below, AIAN stands for "American Indian / Alaska Native" and "NHPI" stands for "Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander."
The CDC case data shows 4.09% of the U.S. population having had COVID-19, whereas the CRDT data shows 5.12% of the U.S. population having had COVID-19 up to Dec 16 (based on the CDC data only having 80% of the total cases in the CRDT data). Note that the Total group is larger than all of the other groups because it also includes the 45% of cases in the data that didn't have known race/ethnicity.
We can also look at the percent of each age and race/ethnicity group who had COVID-19.
We can see above that people age 20-29 are more likely to get COVID-19 than any other age group in almost all race/ethnicity groups. Because different race/ethnicity groups have different age compositions, splitting the cases into cases per age and race/ethnicity group allows us to compare race/ethnicity data against each other without the different age compositions complicating the comparison.
We can also look at the age-adjusted case rates, which uses a standard age composition across all race/ethnicity groups to weight the values within each age group. This allows us to compare the rate of COVID-19 within each race/ethnicity group and remove age composition differences as a factor from the comparison. The CDC publishes age-adjusted prevalence data for deaths and high-level data for cases.
We can see below that, unlike for COVID-19 deaths, the crude and age-adjusted numbers are fairly similar within each race/ethnicity group except for Asian/NHPI, where the age-adjusted rate is 1.2 percentage points higher. Note that we combined those Asian and NHPI into one category to calculate age-adjusted numbers due to the availability of Census/ACS data with those age and race/ethnicity breakdowns.
Rates of COVID-19 cases in each population group:
We can also view disparities by comparing the percentage of total cases that a race/ethnicity group accounts for in a county (the cases share) vs. the percentage of the total population that a race/ethnicity accounts for in a county (the population share). There is no disparity when the cases share is equal to the population share for all race/ethnicity groups in a county (ratio = 1.0). When the ratio of cases share to population share is above 1.0, then a group has a disproportionate number of cases relative to its share of the population.